This transcription was created by community member @HamMan2118 - thank you!
Introduction
[Jayne] Hi, everyone. We are back with our monthly live Developer Stream. I hope you all have had a nice spring so far and have been enjoying your month flying in the sim. We are looking forward to answering many of your questions this morning. My name is Jayne, I am the Senior Community Manager for Microsoft Flight Simulator hosting today’s stream. Before we get started, of course, I’d like to welcome back our regular panel of people, starting, of course, with Jorg Neumann. It’s great to have you, Jorg. How are you doing?
[Jorg] Hi everyone!
[Jayne] Thanks for joining us today. In the middle, we have Sebastian or Seb Wloch. Welcome back, Seb. How are you?
[Seb]I’m great. Hello, everyone.
[Jayne] Thanks, Seb. And to the right, we have Martial Bossard. Martial, how are you doing?
[Martial] Hello. I’m very, very pleased to be here. I’m fine, thank you!
[Jayne] And to everyone in chat we appreciate you joining. I’m curious, everyone, where are you tuning in from? I’d love to see where in the world people are right now. Feel free to post that in the chat. While you answer that, we’ve received a ton of great questions in our forum throughout the month, and so we’ll be sharing answers throughout the entire stream. We will also have three different Q&A sessions today, so we do ask that you hold questions until those sessions. It’ll be obvious, you’ll see it on the screen pop up. And then we will start accepting live questions and answering some of the ones we already have. We also have two special guests joining us today. We’ll introduce them later on, but look forward to that. Wow. Looks like the answer is all over the place. We have Norway. We have Washington. We have some Munich, Germany in there. Florida. Welcome, everyone. Finland. Nice. Glad you’re tuning in from all around the world. Hungary. Ooh, I’m liking it. All right. Yeah. Welcome, everyone. All right. Let’s get started with our presentation. Jorg, I’ll hand it to you.
[Jorg] All right. So hi, everyone. Should be a great session. As Jayne said, we have two guests. So it’s going to be fun. We’re following up on a ton of topics and your questions. So thank you! We also talk about Sim Update 15.
And like last time, because I saw in the chat quite a few people say something about 2024. We are going to do kind of like last time [which will be] a small announcement at the very end. So it should be fun. All right. So first off, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone. First off with your patience for some update 15, you know, we’ve talked about this for a while and it’s obviously late, but we are excited about the updates. We think it’s going to be excellent and we’re, going to talk about it here just in a little bit. And I just want to thank you also for last two updates because they were frankly, quite personal. So City Update 6, Southwest Germany. Some of us call it Baden-Württemberg. I’m not sure if you know, I grew up there in the Black Forest so it was near and dear to my heart. I was actually a little nervous when we shipped it. And I hope people like it because it’s a little obscure maybe. But the feedback was really good. And some people say it’s been our best [City] Update so far. So thank you for that, for all the positive vibes. I know that the team was beaming because they tried really hard to make it look awesome. And then also thank you… Obviously, iniBuilds made the plane, but I was very happy with the positive feedback on the Donier. As you probably know, I picked these Local Legends and Famous Flyers. And I was nervous about this one because it never really went into service. So it’s like a little obscure plane. But to me personally, it was actually an influential plane when I grew up. And I think iniBuilds did a great job. And thank you for embracing it, even though it’s kind of a strange bird. But it has its own beauty, I think.
Roadmap
[Jorg] All right. So let’s look at the roadmap. Still early days, 2024. We’ve already launched a world update and the Bell, the Dune expansion, the City Update, the Dornier. We’re about to launch SU15. I’ll talk about this in a second. But if you go to the next slide, as you might remember, it was originally planned for March. Actually, this was our March release and we’ve been obviously working on it more. And I think there was a question, so let’s go. This is sort of a sort of Q&A.
Sim Update 15
[Jorg] So if you look at the first question, hey, provide more detail on why it’s late. Okay, well, so it’s late because if you go to the next thing, because there’s a [crap] ton of stuff in it. I think there’s 300-something changes, Seb said. Here’s just a list, and we’re going to go through it in some more detail, and with that, I’ll hand it off to Seb.
[Seb] Yeah, so… as Jorg said, I checked through the change list this morning and it’s 280 something. It’s a lot of stuff, but so I can’t comment on all but a few important ones. And I think a few of those who cause actually the delay, the most important one is stability. We have done a lot of improvements to stability. There’s been a lot of bug fixes, crash fixes. And one important change we want to do is integrate an updated version of the GDK, which is pretty much the Xbox platform we’re running on. And particularly because it brings a great stability improvement for Xbox users, more memory on the Xbox [Series] S, which we can take advantage of and which will result in a reduced number of, you know, black avionics or crashes or all that.
[Jayne] Can you explain what GDK means? I got someone asking.
[Seb] Game Developer Kit, I think. If I’m not wrong, I think that’s what it means. It’s pretty much a platform. It’s like the SDK. It’s the SDK we use to make games, pretty much. [On to] performance, very important. That’s one important change, which has been discussed fairly largely, is memory changes. And there are actually two categories, right? There is a… memory system which we’ve changed and that’s really only just for PC users. And it comes with a additional debug information. So for those people who use the dev mode and who have the bar on the right, the FPS display at the bottom, there’s new numbers which give indications on the memory performance on PC. And also the allocated memory counter is now accurate. If you open the system, You know where all the processes are and you look at the memory it uses. It’s going to be very similar to what we display because it’s actually used memory, not just a physical one. And this really helps. I would say in one case, if you have a slow experience, you may want to look at this. Maybe you’re allocating 30 gigs of RAM and you only have 16. Something like this can happen. And it goes back to one of the questions, which is stutters. The memory system was made to reduce stutters in the long run. Snow coverage has been largely covered. We took advantage of the winter to do a lot of testing and debugging. And so it’s the water in Switzerland, when all the lakes were frozen, or in Norway, all the fields were frozen, this has been largely improved. ATC improvements, one of them is when they completely lose voice, or sometimes they say stuff twice. So there’s been a lot of fixes on the voice, on interrupting or losing voices. Live traffic, there’s a few changes on live traffic to make sure we take advantage of the full data set we get and having pretty much more live traffic planes. [Martial] And liveries! And liveries also, yeah. Improved liveries system. This actually caused issues on memory because if you have more planes, then you use more memory and it forced us to do even more improvements on the memory system. There’s also helicopters, multirotor, etc. It’s not even listed, but there’s been a lot of helicopter improvements. Ground friction. So a new system which simulates the rubber or the flexibility of the whole gear sometimes, which makes it much more lively. And also you see the vibration. We’ve shown videos of that. But also the whole handling is a lot better because you’re not on rails anymore. You have this flexibility of the wheel, which can twist a little bit to the left or the right when you turn or when you brake or whatever. It changes all sorts of taxing. It changes all sorts of moments on the ground.
[Jorg] Maybe before we move on, I just want to, obviously Seb knows this stuff better than I do, but I think the, the memory, the virtual file system saved us how much memory?
[Seb] So on the virtual file system, there is an improvement, which is over 30 gigs at least. But the issue is pretty much the more, the more things you would install, the more it was. I mean, every file was a little bit of memory, right? Because we, We need to store file names and info on the file and stuff. And this got improved. So basically, it’s making sure you can install as many things into the community folder, as many items as you want. And you don’t get more issues relatively to the number of items you install. And I think it also, I mean, when you reduce memory, it also always runs smoother. So that’s a big improvement.
[Jorg] Yeah. And then maybe on the GDK thing, I just want to stick on this. Because I think we owe you an explanation why this is taking longer, but it’s well worth it. So the GDK thing, I say sometimes gifts come from the heavens. This one was on those. The Xbox team did a great job. They’re affording us with, I think, 570 megabytes more memory, which is a big deal, right? That system is memory limited. So I think it’s going to help a lot with stability. And then I think we forgot something, Seb, about WASM. You want to speak to that a little bit?
[Seb] So maybe Martial knows more. So WASM, I’m not the big WASM expert. I know there’s been a lot of issues fixed on WASM.
[Jorg] I know. I’ll talk to it. So basically, as you know, the iniBuilds A320 in the flight and also the A310 are very popular, but they also crash sometimes. And we sort of went back and forth with the iniBuilds, and it turns out that the problems were in the WASM code, and the server found them. and is in the process of fixing them. So there was some stack overflow thing and some other bugs. And ultimately, I think that’s going to also help stability quite a bit. So it’s great news all the way.
[Martial] I thought we were ready to talk about that during the last stream, but we are talking so much that I’m not sure. But basically, it’s the way the allocation is done on WASM and the fact that we were not fraying all the memory that was used during the initialization phase. So basically, if you, need a lot of memory to initialize a plane, this memory will be blocked forever. And now we are freeing more stuff. So it will help to get memory and obviously some stability, especially on Xbox.
[Jorg] All right. Now we’re moving on. First guest!
Chat Question: New Pilot Testers
[Jayne] All right. Actually, right before, I saw this live question here. It said, Microsoft solicited for five pilots to work with Microsoft and Asobo devs back in November. Is that integration assisting?
[Jorg] So I don’t even remember this. I can tell you we staffed up a lot. We have a team that we call the "Pilot Tester’ team. There’s obviously pilot testers at Asobo. There’s pilot testers at the partners we have, like, for example, IniBuilds. And then we hired a team that is now, I think, 11 real-world pilots that are 100% dedicated to testing basically all day long. So that’s what we did. And I think that’s what that effort was for. And it is helping. Yeah, of course.
[Martial] Well, it’s not only on the test team, right? We’ve got pilots almost in every area. Even in the production team,
So we’ve got pilots everywhere now.
G3X update from Working Title
[Jayne] Yeah, very true. All right, next question here. and of course, with SU15 we have the overhauled G3X Touch. So we do have a guest to introduce you to. We have Charles Wang from Working Title, [who is a] Senior Software Developer. Charles, welcome. First time on the stream. Glad to have you. How are you doing today?
[Charles] I’m doing great. Thank you, Jayne.
[Jayne] Glad you can join us to give us a little deeper dive here into the G3X Touch. So let’s get into it.
[Charles] All right. Hello, everybody. Like Jayne said, I’m Charles, one of the developers at Working Title, and I specifically led the team that worked on the new version of the G3X for SU15. And I’m really excited to be able to share with you guys just a few of the cool new features that will be available with this new version. So let’s just dive right in. So we’re going to start with the PFD. So what’s cool about the G3X is that it has a fairly large screen. And so with that, it can actually display a lot of useful information that you might not otherwise be able to get, for example, with a traditional six pack. And so the first thing that I want you guys to turn your attention to is labeled number one there in the top center, those little green triangles on top of the roll arc. Those are your standard rate turn pointers. What those do is they tell you exactly how much bank you need to make a perfect three degree per second standard rate turn. So pretty useful when you’re hand flying the plane. And then up next, number two, is the HSI track modes. If you look at the HSI, the compass at the bottom center, it’s currently in what’s called track mode. And in that mode, HSI is actually aligned with the ground track of the airplane instead of its heading. So again, useful for when you’re hand flying, especially in high crosswinds, because then you can just point the HSI to where you want the airplane to fly, and then you don’t need to do any sort of wind corrections in your head or anything like that. Next are the two inset boxes at the bottom right and left corners of the screen. There are actually a lot of insets you can put on the PFD with the G3X. We’re only showing a couple of them. So here on the left, we have the flight plan inset where you can actually view where you are in your flight plan, great for some situational awareness. And then on the bottom right, you have a list of the closest airports to your current position. So it can be useful if something happens in the flight and you need to put the airplane down real quick. And you can actually make it even easier for yourself to identify where the closest airport is by turning on the nearest airport bearing pointer. That’s number five. So that will tell you both what the nearest airport is, how far away it is. And if you look at the HSI, that associated cyan arrow is going to point to where that nearest airport is. So you can just always very quickly, at a glance, just know exactly how to turn the plane to get yourself somewhere safe. So those are just a few of the features available on the PFD. We don’t have time to go over them all. So you just have to discover the rest for yourself when SU15 releases. So we’re gonna move on to some other cool things that the G3X has to offer. So the first of these is the lean assist feature on the left. So some of you might be familiar with this from, or at least a similar feature from the G1000 NXI. Basically what this does is when you turn it on, it helps you to lean your engine. So if you’re chasing that perfect fuel mixture for maximum like cruise fuel economy, this can help you really dial that in. And speaking of fuel economy, the GTX also has a fuel calculator feature depicted on the right. So this helps with in-flight fuel management. So it keeps track of how much fuel you have left, how long that fuel is going to last you, how far you can fly with that fuel. So useful for if you just want to double check that you actually have enough fuel gas left in your plane to actually make it to your destination, or maybe if you want to aim for an airport that’s a little bit closer to land. And if you do find yourself needing to try and pick out an airport to land in the middle of the flight, the G3X gives you some more tools to do that as well. And you can actually pull up an airport information window on the G3X that will tell you all sorts of useful information about any airport in the database. So for example, here we’re looking at SeaTac International. If I go to the runway tab depicted on the left, I can view information on the runways available at that airport. And the G3X will actually tell you the current wind conditions for a particular runway. And it will even choose a preferred landing direction for you. So for example, here in the green, the G3X is telling me that I should probably land to the north on [Runway] 34 instead of [Runway] 16 to take advantage of some headwinds. And if I actually want more weather data, I can go on over to the weather tab depicted on the right there. So in this tab, it’ll give you information about the latest METAR available for that airport. And conveniently, the G3X will also decode that METAR and present it to you in a more user-friendly way. So that’s particularly helpful for those of us who may not be quite so adept at parsing those raw METAR strings in our heads. So let’s say we’ve picked our destination airport, now we need to get there. So in terms of getting from point A to point B with the G3X, it’s important to know that the G3X by itself is a VFR only unit, so visual flight rules only. So it doesn’t support IFR flight planning. So it won’t support things like SIDS, STARS, and approaches, or at least not the full published IFR approaches that most of you are probably familiar with. However, what it does offer is the ability to load these sort of abbreviated quote unquote VFR versions of published approach procedures into your flight plan. Now, when you load one of these, it’s only going to give you guidance for the very last part of the approach, basically the final approach segments. You’re not flying the full approach. You’re not getting any vertical guidance via VNAV or glide paths. So it’s limited in one sense, but it’s still useful because it essentially gives you lateral guidance to line yourself up with the runway and essentially be able to visually establish on that runway by looking out the window. So some of you might be disappointed that the G3X is VFR only, but that’s not the full story. So the VFR only thing applies when the G3X is essentially by itself. But what’s cool is that you can actually pair the G3X with what’s called an external navigator. Now these are essentially other Garmin navigation units, for example, like a GNS or a GTN unit. And if those units are IFR capable, they can essentially transfer that IFR capability to the G3X. For example, on this slide, we have a hypothetical airplane where a G3X is connected to a GNS530 as an external navigator. The GNS-530 is an IFR-capable unit. Here we’ve loaded the RNAV Zulu 3R approach into Detroit Metro. That’s a full RNAV LPV approach. And because the GNS is connected to the G3X, it can send that IFR flight plan over to the G3X, and the G3X is then able to both display and fly that flight plan. So with this configuration, if we wanted to, we could use the autopilot to fly a fully coupled RNAV LPV approach, and it will fly both laterally. It can capture the glide path and take you right down to the runway. So that’s pretty cool. So I do want to mention, though, that the three first-party default planes that we upgraded with the new G3X for SU15, none of those actually have a configuration like this with an IFR-capable G3X. So those planes are all still just using the VFR-only version. However, when SU15 releases, third-party developers will be able to set up their planes to have configurations like these. So they can hook up a G3X with our GNS unit or other units and make their G3Xs IFR-capable as they see fit. And in fact, we’re pretty excited to see what developers, what cool things they can do within UG3X once they get their hands on it. And so with that, that’s all that I have for you guys today. So this is really fun. I want to thank Jayne, Jorg, everyone here, the entire Flight Sim community team for allowing me to be here and share with you guys just a little taste of what the new G3X has to offer. For those of you who aren’t already in the beta, we’re all really excited for you to get your hands on the G3X because it’s a very cool piece of tech. So, again, thank you, everybody.
[Jorg] Hey, thanks, Charles. There’s a couple of questions. Maybe you can just say, like, one of them that flew by was, which are the three planes?
[Charles] Yeah, so the three planes in the sim that we’ve gone ahead and upgraded are the Cubcrafters X-Cub, and the NX-Cub, the nose wheel version of the X Cub. And then the third one is the GMB BL3.
[Jorg] And is there a plan to do more beyond that?
[Charles] Well, we would obviously love to do more. I think that’s going to be up to you, Jorg.
[Jorg] Yes. Anyways, I saw it in the chat. Hey, how about the icon? Yeah, we’ll talk about it. I mean, the whole thing about working title, doing a lot of this work is that I think third parties, we hope that third-party developers like, oh, well, I think you were saying something earlier that you guys use this, right? It’s for y’all. Like, we do this as a platform feature. And so that that brings I think the working title team the most joy, actually, when you use it. So please engage with this when it comes out.
[Jayne] Yeah. Charles, thank you for that. I think a great comment from chat that kind of sums this up from my role uh from FSreborn. They said, Jorg just wanted to say the way working title implemented all the functionalities and how to configure and tweak G3X is incredibly modular and flexible. It’s a dream to set and configure via .xml settings. Thanks to both for pushing it this way. It makes the life of third-party airplane developers way easier. High five. Thank you for that! And Charles, thanks again for joining us. Great explanation of the G3X application of this product. So we’re really excited to see this in SU15 and we look forward to it.
SU15 Question: A320neo V2
[Jayne] With that being said, we have another question from SU15. Will work continue on the A320 version 2 after its release with SU15 and will more improvements be introduced?
[Jorg] And we’ll give an indirect answer. We have a guest.
[Jayne] We do have a guest! Yes, we are bringing back here Michael Standen from iniBuilds. Welcome, Mike.
[Michael] Hello. Thanks for having me again. Great to be here.
[Jayne] So what do you think about this question?
[Michael] Yeah, so when Jorg invited us along to talk about the A320 again, I thought it’s probably prudent to talk about the team at iniBuilds and kind of the makeup of the team a little bit to help answer some of it. So the development team, [whose] background kind of stems many years in flight simulator. You know a lot of the core team were involved in the original MSFS franchise working through P3D, X-plane obviously, and more recently now on to onto the current franchise. And it’s made up a combination of very talented 3d model artists, texture artists, obviously programming team both XML and WASM. Sound engineers, and also pilots, [who] all make up part of the core dev team obviously. The guys talking about that earlier, there’s, there’s within most studios there is a kind of a sprinkling of pilots and real world knowledge going in throughout all of it. So talking particularly about like the Airbus pilot experience within the team, we have some, like I said, in the core dev team and also our wider testing teams made up of a combination pilots. Instructors, examiners, aircraft mechanics, aeronautical engineers. So a huge wealth of experience on the airbus type aircraft. Cameron, who introduced it in the last live Dev Stream is a current line pilot on the A320neo with lots of hours on there. And I myself, am an Airbus A330 pilot, and you know, have kind of been on 20 years aviation experience, flown multiple aircraft types before I got onto the A330 more recently. So there’s a lot of, like I said, real world experience in there, kind of adding to the mix of trying to bring the realistic representation of the aircraft into the sim. So just to respond to kind of some of the feedback that we have from community about the art changes, particularly to start with. So again, talking about the kind of development process, ideally we use a combination of tools and inputs to make the aircraft as accurate as possible. Starting off with the best solution is to have 3D scans. We obviously use those then to determine the accuracy of lengths and the intricate details of the landing gears and stuff like that. They’re very useful for. Then we obviously have technical drawings that we can use. For the 320, particularly, this was helpful. We used a manual called the AMM, or Aircraft Maintenance Manual, that literally goes and breaks down rivet by rivet the kind of placement of windows and the rivet lines on the aircraft, of which there’s obviously a lot of detail on this one particularly. And then lastly, we obviously use photos that are quite subjective. They’re dependent on the kind of angle they’re taken, the types of lens used. So they’re not always the preferred method we all send a lot of feedback from community um about, you know, the shapes of winglets, the size of the engines and bits like that, all of which were taken on board and made adjustments to, but they’re based on kind of photos, um, as well. So, there’s a little bit of subjectivity in there. But like I said, we’re actively taking on this feedback improving with the more references we receive. We’ve got some updates planned to the areas raised and that will obviously be pushed in future updates throughout the entire aircraft. So, Keep the feedback coming. We’re not ignoring it at all. [Now] talking about the systems particularly, obviously there was the stability issues. We work closely with Asobo, as Jorg said, on the WASM allocation stuff. Lots of work behind the scenes on that to optimize it as much as possible. And we’re in a pretty good place now with that. But in terms of the fidelity of it, we often get asked, “why have you modeled X and not Y?” “You’re missing this system and you’re missing that system.” And generally, the answer is, They’re not common to the NEO. There’s a bit of, obviously, confusion between the CEO and NEO occasionally. But we’ve taken, like I said, that core pilot experience that we’ve got throughout the team to try and model a realistic range of aircraft. So we’ve based it on some of the earlier MSN serial numbers that we’ve had EFCOM access to. So that’s the flight manual for the Airbus. And we obviously also discussed the systems that we wanted to try and implement with the internal pilot team. But being careful not to create a Frankenstein out of it, basically, because you could end up with a real mix and match of systems within it. But most importantly, obviously, this goes on PC and Xbox, so the level of system fidelity is accessible to all as well. And the main aim is to give a true representation of normal line operations. It doesn’t go into the full detail of all the emergency systems, but a day-to-day A to B type operation is very well covered uh with all the systems that are available particularly like the autopilot, the fly-by-wire all the protections envelope. All the stuff that keeps me out of trouble normally on the flying side of things. They’re all modeled very accurately now so that’s where we’re at with that one. Some of the systems that there’s some queries raised about what ECAMs are popping up where one particularly I saw a comment on was the fuel pressure and people were confusing that with an imbalance fault but if you look closely at the ECAM it’s actually one of the one of the subheadings that you have to follow is talking about is there a fuel imbalance monitoring the fuel imbalance but the actual ECAM itself is very realistic to the new to the neo it’s one of the nuances you have on the 320 neo aircraft particularly in short haul operations um and it’s to do with when the fuel transfer happens. There’s a pump that switches off between the outer and center tanks that causes a very brief kind of low-pressure fault. And that’s what you’re seeing that’s modeled on the aircraft in the simulation. We also saw some feedback about the radios and how they’re used. So, the RMP behavior is correct. It was originally modeled to obviously work with the in-sim ATC. but obviously a lot of feedback on making it work with VATSIM as well, which we’ve now addressed, and you’ll see in updates very shortly. And then finally, talking about the flight model. As I said, I have a huge amount of experience on our dev team and testing team, particularly with 320s. It’s obviously a really popular aircraft, and there’s a lot of pilots flying it. But what was quite interesting to see, and we took quite… quite a bit of time to kind of resolve uh during the development was there’s actually quite a bit of a difference between the NEO and the CEO in terms of fill because of the fly-by-wire systems it’s got a kind of different logic behind it in the rotation effect but all the all the performance issues raised with performance, the rotation speeds being too high, you know, not always getting adequate EFP performance when you probably get it out of another aircraft that’s all realistic and based on true-to-life EFB numbers that we we’ve have access to. So yeah, I think hopefully that’s answered a few queries that are kind of out there just to try and explain a bit more kind of why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it and hopefully that helps.
[Jayne] Yeah. Thank you so much Mike.
[Jorg] Thanks Mike. I [quickly] want to say something. So, to answer the question, because the question was, “Hey, are you going to keep working on this?” Yes. And so the first thing is I want to make sure that you hear iniBuilds is reading pretty much every post, right? And they are a self-critical team. So, I’m like, I’m convinced if there’s some stuff, it’s going to get fixed over time, just like every plane. There was some, do we want to do a [unintelligible] Mike, like about some engine variants? I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it, but it could be fun.
[Michael] Could do, yeah.
[Jorg] Want to say it?
[Michael] I don’t think we’ve agreed on the type yet, have we?
[Jorg] Not in time yet, but we’re going to do it.
[Michael] Yeah. Yeah, so… so obviously the LEAP engine is modeled, but there’s plans to do the CFMs and as many variants as we can fit in, basically.
[Jorg] So just like what happened with the 747, 787, where Working Title took a deep dive, making it great, the same intent exists for every airliner in the sim. And Working Title is with us doing it. So I’m excited about that.
[Jayne] All right. Thank you, Mike. We’re going to move on to our Q&A session one.
Q&A Session One
[Jayne] All right. Chat, feel free to ask questions. We’ll pick some throughout, and we’ll get started.
Question: Users would like you to discuss unintentional user data wipes, why they happen, if we can mitigate it, if users can manually back them up, and more.
[Jayne] There’s a forum thread about this in our official forums. So let’s discuss Martial. Looking into this, what do you have to say about it?
[Martial] We had a look on the forum with the team, and unfortunately, it looks like it’s more an issue that is happening on a platform when you’re doing the synchronization between what you store on the cloud and what is stored locally on your machine. On PC, there’s always meant to copy-paste data. On Xbox, you won’t get any correction of that. So, I’m pretty sorry. It would be difficult for us to act on that bug. I don’t want to point fingers on anybody else, but unfortunately, it’s nothing we can do here. I mean, from so… I know that all the games… [Jorg] It’s Microsoft’s fault, is what he’s saying. No, I’m not. No, no, no, no. What I’m saying is that it’s not… Well, Flatteam is not the only software which is on which this bug is happening. I don’t have any leverage on this one.
[Jorg] So anyways, maybe we should say it this way. So we looked into it deeply, found that it has something to do with changes on the back end, on the Microsoft side. I’ll take that ball, and I’ll report back. It shouldn’t be a frequent occurrence, obviously. It’s not like Xbox is constantly losing safe games or something. But something must have happened, so we’ll look into it more.
[Jayne] Yeah. Thank you. All right.
Do the PC and Xbox versions run from the same code base? In cases where an update introduces bugs or odd behavior on only one platform, how complex is it to identify and mitigate the cause?
[Seb] So it is the same code base. It’s the same project. And in the CodeWare software, we can just change the platform. So, all the code is shared, but then there is some source code which is exclusive to some platforms. Sometimes programmers will know if devs or stuff like this, which allows you to have lines dedicated to each platform. It’s still pretty rare. Most of the code is shared and bugs which only happen on one platform are therefore also pretty rare, but it happens. And yes, then they are more difficult to identify because you only see them on part of the users or part of the platform. Fortunately, we have a very good tracking telemetry on anything, crashes, bugs. And even if it’s just on one platform, we see it very clearly. And the QA department send us very good issue reports, which are platform by platform. So when something happens only on one, even though the number of users is lower, we still see it and we can still address it. I hope this answers.
[Jayne] Thanks, Seb. All right.
FOV and pincushion distortion, especially on curved ultra-wide screens. And for blended and merged beamer setups, the fixed FOV and pincushion distortion are problematic. It can be easily seen when the flight instruments on the screen sides are triple as wide as the same side instruments in the center of the screen. That makes distance estimations and traffic patterns really hard. Can you talk about this?
[Martial] Maybe I can? So basically, this issue is coming from a projection issue. It’s like when you’ve got the world being projected into a map. Here, it’s the same thing. We’ve got projection matrix that projects the 3D world into a 2D screen, even if it’s curved. And it’s always creating some distortion, that kind of projection. So, there’s plenty, well, there’s plenty, there’s several solutions. The first one is what we are using here. Very next to me, there’s a simulator that we’ve built here, which uses three different video projectors on almost 180 degrees. And we are using three different camera views projected and aligned. So this is a way to get some less wide projection on each. This is one of the solutions. Maybe people could do that during some different rendering, different windows and align them on the screen. It’s not very convenient, but that could be one solution. The other solution that we’ve got is something called Lens Correction that we’ve got in the game. It helps us to do that reprojection, that lens correction. As a matter of fact, you’re losing details on the side of the screen because the way the project is done, as the bug is describing, you don’t get the same size of objects in the middle of the screen that what you’ve got on the side. So in order to do that, in order to do this for projections, it has to enlarge some part of the screens, and this is creating a blurry rendering. So it’s not ideal, I would say. What we could do is like the kind of rendering we’re doing for VR is like to really do a rendering on a very high resolution and do another projection, but that would cost a lot because of the target of the rendering, which would need an extra resolution. So I’ve had a chat with our rendering specialist and, well, we are going to look on that to find the solution. But, yes, for now, two solutions, either selecting some different rendering targets and doing alignments or using the lens distortion option that we’ve got in the game.
[Jayne] Cool. Thanks, Martial. All right, we have our next question.
When will AMD FSR 3.1 be added?
[Martial] The team is working on that. The main target for now is FS24, but I think we will backport the solution that we’ve created to, I think, the plan is to backport the solution that we are going to bring on FS24 and FS20. [Jayne] Yeah, awesome. It won’t be for SU15. I’m sorry about that.
[Jayne] All right. Question from chat.
Is there any insight on future avionics sets we can expect as airplane developers? It helps to plan ahead our future products.
[Jorg] We’ll talk about it, but not today. Yeah, fair point. But we have some specific announcement points planned. Not this Dev Q&A, but there’s obviously other stuff coming. So we’ll let you know as soon as we can. Soon.
[Jayne] Cool. All right.
With the great work being done on the helicopter flight model, are other areas of the helicopter flight model continuing to be developed? For instance, drag clutch and governor for turbine helis. We also have needle split checks in here that aren’t functional.
[Jayne] I read this question here. So Seb, what do you have for us on helicopters?
[Seb] So, yes, first of all, in SU15, you have quite a long list of improvements on helicopters, for instance, on turbines, multiple motors. Also, about the split checks, I talked to the people here who are in charge of the Cabri, who are also pilots on the Cabri. Apparently, the technology has everything it needs, so we simulate the clutch correctly. And especially with improvements on SU15, that also should apply to turbine engines. It’s a matter of fine tuning the clutch so that the split check works correctly. So that’s probably an improvement we will do on the Cabri in one of the next, when it gets updated again. And it should be possible to do that correctly on the other aircraft with SU15 and improvements on the turbines. If it’s not, I mean, if someone has an issue, he can always reach out to support. We will help. But from what our helicopter pilot said, that’s something we can tune. And the flight sim should support it correctly.
[Jayne] Yeah. Okay. And just heads up for chat. I see a lot of DX12 questions. We have a question already in our stream later on, though. So we’ll cover that in a bit. All right. Next question we have.
This user and many users have been struggling a lot with stutters on final approach, even though they have a very high spec PC and usually at good FPS. So is this something the team is aware of and looking into improving? And kind of in tandem, will the SC15 memory optimizations improve the way the sim loads airports on approach?
[Seb] Yes, so that’s basically… I think this stuttering on final has been a topic for a long time now. And this is what actually triggered all the work on the new memory system. Asobo has spent a lot of time actively testing long flights and finals. And I think a little less than a year ago, I showed behind me, you have the, I don’t know if you see all these screens. So I have seven computers now in the office. on which I run long flights on. That’s one reason why we added this little display that people will find in the FPS bar on the right, which says how many memory allocations there are, how long it takes. And basically, when we did that, we found that after maybe two hours, for example, on PC, the memory was very fast. And so the what is called large allocations were taking only a few microseconds. But when I let, for example, the A320 fly for 10 hours or 12 hours and came back, it would… And then, especially close to the ground, but any allocation would be very slow. It went up to sometimes one second for just one allocation. And when you go to the ground, what happens is there’s a lot of airport loading, traffic loading, terrain, because you go down. All this stuff is loading and everything needs to have some space in memory. So it does allocations. And so what we found is that we had already fixed quite a lot of things causing stutter on final. But what was causing really the largest remaining cause was this memory thing. So basically what we changed is the way we allocate large blocks. It’s a completely different path. And the numbers are 1,000 times faster for this. So what you will see is it’s usually very fast. We tested again and didn’t see further stutters. It doesn’t mean that it’s fixed 100%. Maybe it’s still there. We can’t be 100% sure. All the tests we did so far didn’t show it again. It was very dependent on how much memory you have, what setting you have, how long you’ve been flying. It didn’t happen all the time. And sometimes it was way before 10 hours. But that was the whole point of all these memory changes was to try to get rid of stutters on final. We’re looking forward for feedback. If users who see an improvement, we would like to know if people still have it, if they can give us context, like what the flight was, where it was, that would help so we can reproduce it. And we will continue testing our site, but we really hope that SU15 will bring a great improvement to many users.
[Jayne] Yeah. And some people in the chat were wondering, those seven computers that you have running, what kind of graphics cards do you have?
[Jorg] Supercomputers, Seb!
[Seb] Well, I have a 2060 and 70 Super. And then I have 3070 Super or not. I don’t know. I don’t have any 4000. It’s a mix. They’re all different. Some have 32 gigs, some have 64. It’s… They’re all very different. One has 24 cores, the other has only eight. It’s all over the place.
[Jayne] Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Seb. And our question here:
Is it possible to ask for a shorter, effective way to move all the extra content to another drive from within the game? The C drive is clogged with 400 gigs of planes, liveries, and others, but cannot move them to another drive. So far, I had to stop playing the game and format my PC as I was not able to find and move those files.
[Martial] Okay, so yes, you can. There’s two ways of doing that. The very first one is to edit a file called… I’ve taken some notes because I don’t know that by heart. It’s config… Ah, there it is. Of course. It’s usercfg.opt because most of the times we’ve got .cfg files in here. For some reason, we’ve decided to go on the other way. That’s why I didn’t want to give you some false information. So if you look at usercfg.opt, that’s the path on which all the packages are installed. So you can modify that file and move the packages wherever you want. Of course, it’s not too much… the path that you’ve written in the usercfg.apt. Or the other way is to take all the packages, put them exactly where you want them to be, and you can launch again the the game on the next launch, you will get an interface saying that you’re missing the packages, and you’ve got an installation process that runs again. And on this installation process, you can specify the the place where you’ve moved the packages. And then you won’t have to reload anything. The installation process will check that the file is already on your hard drive and then will check every single file. You don’t have to do any kind of updates. It will proceed and you will be able to continue play.
[Jayne] Twotonemurphy here says,
Is something like a SIM health monitor an idea? Asobo knows the best requirements. Could this be expanded to software, like knowing if a third-party add-on is causing an issue with the SIM code? Some seller points to us in the right direction, but if there was a health check option, maybe the SIM could self-diagnose an issue or conflict?
[Martial] Self-diagnose? So we’ve got every… We’ve got plenty of tools so people could check their contents when using the dev mode. There’s also when something has created a crash, you can still run in safe mode in order to check that with the vanilla version, you won’t get any issue. I would say we’ve done that six or seven months ago. We are collecting some data. to help us to track exactly what were the add-ons and what was the plan and the location that were used when the crash occurred. So we can get now stats on our hand and try to figure out if there’s any big issue, large issue with add-ons. So Seb, I don’t know if you’ve got another answer on that topic.
[Jayne] All right. A couple other questions that I’ve been seeing.
Are there any plans to open the World Hub for more developers?
[Jorg] I think it’s open still. I think we have 1,200 right now. We’re still in alpha, as you probably know. But it wasn’t locked or anything. As far as I know, we are still taking people. As a matter of fact, I talked to the PM and he said it’s sort of really flattened how many people are trying to get in. So we were just chatting the other day. Should we call it beta or should we call it final? Because we don’t think there’s that many people left. So if you want to, just apply.
[Jayne] Yeah. Awesome. All right. Jorg, you have a small update for us?
Shallow Water Update
[Jorg] I do? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think this might be hard to see, but I wanted to follow up, you know, because we had this conversation about shallow water stuff. So here’s an example of Turks and Caicos. That is what we started with when this whole journey began. And it’s basically just to explain, right? So this is obviously from a high angle. This is from a high angle, but what we’re drawing is the actual highest level of LOD, like the best data we have taken from a low flying aircraft. And unfortunately, they fly in strips. And it’s a mess. When you put it together, that’s what it looks like. And we kind of have to contend with that. As you go through vertical LODs, you see pops, right? So, then we did this exercise that I think I showed last time, if you want to just show that. Yeah, so that is the next step. So we basically took all the GeoTIFFs into one environment and harmonized. There’s some tools in Photoshop that do that kind of stuff, plus there’s a bunch of hand editing that needs to happen. So that was pretty darn close. And then just like this last few weeks, we did one more step. Yeah. So more subtle, but now we are to the point that it’s, it’s good. And so this is the highest LOD. So the most detailed textures and what we’ll get out of that is the other derived LODs as you fly up are going to be contiguous. There’s not going to be any more color breaks. It’s quite a bit of work. So I think this area, which is not exactly huge, Turks and Caicos, took about 40 or so hours. But we made an agreement with Bing. They’re now going to take this as the Bing reality, so the entire stack. And so we’re enhancing Bing through Flight Sim, actually. And we’re going to go through all the shallow waters in the world. They calculated it to be, I think, 11.3 man years. So it’s going to take us a while. And so it’s not all going to be on the same magical moment, but we will go nibble on this and we’ll update it as we go.
[Jayne] Thanks for the update on that.
[Jorg] I mean, it was super cool. I mean, actually, the feedback from y’all on the Caribbean update actually triggered this because I agreed. We got rid of the shallow waters because of the completely crazy textures everywhere. But it’s unacceptable. Plus, it’s beautiful there. So we’re going to commit ourselves to go get this done. It’ll probably take us two years or so. It’ll be five people for like two years. Painting. Yeah.
[Jayne] All right. Thanks, Jorg. Back to questions. We got some world and weather questions here. This is very long, but feel free to read it, chat. Basically, this question is asking,
Q&A Session Two
Will historical weather service load weather just from the previous 24 to 30 hours when it happened instead of, you know, I know they just wanted to make sure you understood the historical data they’re referring to is something like that rather than, you know, the past like tornadoes and all that kind of stuff. So is that in the works?
[Martial] Yeah, yes, it is. So it also helps people to be able to fly in real life conditions, even if you’re on the opposite side of the planet, let’s say that. In France, we want to fly over New Zealand with real-time weather or real weather. It would be complicated to do that in daylight. So this is something we want to bring in FS24. We’ve changed the way the weather is trimmed in order to get that buffer. It would be around 24 hours of buffer in order to do that. So this is in a pipe. It will be brought in winter. With [FS]24. This change is a change of the architecture and the way how the weather stream was needed. So I don’t think that we would have time to bring that to 20. But with 24, we would have this possibility.
[Jayne] Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Marcial. All right. During the last Q&A, Jorg, you mentioned that…
Bing would be making massive updates this year to aerial imagery around the world. How will this impact airports in 2020? Can we expect to see many of the outdated or missing airports addressed this year in mass? Or will we be reliant on World Hub contributors to make the numerous needed updates going forward?
[Jorg] So the answer is probably a combination, but I’ll tell you what’s going on. So we just this week got 200 terabytes of new data from Bing. which is what we’re going to launch Flight Sim 2024 with as far as aerials is concerned. Are they newer? Oh yeah, a lot of it. I think in total, this whole thing is 2.2 petabytes and we have 230 or something terabyte that are brand new since we did the last World Update essentially. So how is it going to affect the US? Yeah, I mean, there will be newer textures. That means that the airports that have new you know, additions or retractions or deletions that will be updated and then the automatic system will be run. So there will be new procedural buildings, trees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we’re going to and that world is shared. So not I mean, there’s a bunch of features that we sort of saw in the trailer that are that can’t be shared because it’s a different it’s a different version of the engine. But the fundamental big data like the Digital elevation maps and the aerials will be shared between both. So the team have to go in and actually check the airports, make sure that everything still works right. That is going to be pretty massive because the US has over 20,000. But that work is now starting. And you will benefit in 2020 from that as well. Will there be mistakes? No doubt. So that’s what the World Hub is for. And you can help us get it right. But we’ll have a new shiny set of 2023 satellite images.
[Jayne] Thanks Jorg. All right. Let’s talk about this.
Could you give us an update on the DX11 tile popping issue and DX12 tile bleed through issue that’s still happening in the SU15 beta? The DX11 tile popping is a global issue. I’m sure you will understand this is becoming frustrating as it spoils the otherwise excellent look of the sim.
[Martial] So, we’ve got two bugs here. The first one, the tidepopping, should be fixed for more of it. So, that was linked to an access to some deprecated data. So, we changed that. This change has started for the City Update 6. And so, it should be now done for SU15, completely done. Regarding this DirectX 12 update, texture issue, so the bug is also on our bug database. I know that the team has looked at that because it was, well, we talked earlier about this GDK thing. When we changed GDK, we [also had] some other weird stuff happening in texture, so they have been fixed, and this was part of the texture things to be fixed. I don’t have the status for this very one, But I know that it’s on the team’s bug list.
[Jorg] Which one, Martial? I know.
[Martial] You know, there’s a weird bug on which you can see Ariel popping above the rendering of the airport.
[Jorg] Yeah. So I think we heard, like, so there’s two things, right? There was a set of problems around World Update 8, 9, and 10 where basically, you know, they were right next to each other. It was like Italy, France, and Germany, Switzerland, or something. And in those overlaps, there was sort of a checkerboard pattern. And that one should be gone. And then there is what a lot of people seem to think has something to do with DX11, DX12. And as far as we know, it has nothing to do with DX12 at all. There are some issues. And actually, just to say it that way, we could actually use your help. So because we see these questions, and we actually went, we read the threads, obviously, on the forums. The test team has spent, I want to say, two weeks now trying to find regressions because I have the same experience. I fly through some areas and I’m like, okay, that’s popping. But we don’t think it’s new. We actually don’t think so. I just talked to the World Test Lead and they’re like, we don’t think it’s new. So if you see it, like if you have, for example, a picture or a video of an area that was one way and then you have it another way, that would be great to get. Just link it in the forum thread and we’ll find it. Because the problem we have, we only have one world, right? So there’s the world of Bing that we render in Flight Sim with all of the additions that Flight Sim makes. But we don’t have an A-B test. We don’t have like a second world floating around that we can compare it to. So we are not at all sure that this is a regression. It is definitely not good, what we call vertical color break. In some areas, it’s just not good. But some of that will be fixed with the new aerials that we just talked about. Because we’re going to run all this again.
[Martial] In the chat, they’re complaining about having this particular bug, the one I was talking to, to be exclusive to DirectX 12. So as a matter of fact, we don’t have only one bug. There’s several. This very one, the one that I talked about, is really, really, really 100% DirectX 12 only. And this one is tracked back to you.
[Jayne] Yeah, I think there’s many threads. on the forums and also internally, many bug reports. So I think because there are multiple bugs within this issue, I think there’s a lot of confusion separating which bug is what. But yeah, I understand the confusion.
[Martial] You would say that the Earth is big, and it takes time to check everything. And yeah.
[Jayne] All right. Thank you.
What is the news regarding the London and Stockholm improvements talked about last year by York?
[Jorg] Yeah. So London is currently in processing, but we haven’t edited it yet. So we’ll launch it when it’s done. There’s quite a bit more around London than what we had in the past. But this was such a nice tie-in that I think we’re going to go to the next section, which is there’s a story to this. [I’m] always hesitating to tell the story.
World Update 17/City Update 7
So if you look at the roadmap, this was actually intended to be World Update 16 or something, or 17, I forget. And what happened, so I say it because I saw it earlier in the thread about World Update Brazil, as some people call it. We actually have a plane in Brazil. And so it’s interesting weather in Brazil. So we have some things captured, and then we just got a rejection from the ATC of one of the big, big cities that we want. And then what happens is you have to resubmit the flight path and the ATC has to approve it. That then goes to the city government, et cetera, et cetera. So I had to postpone the planned World Update Brazil. And instead we’re launching this City Update 7, which I thought we can tackle some other things that were mentioned. So if you’re going to go through it, I took a couple of screenshots here in the last days. They’re not very good. So this is not an engine yet. And you will see that right away. So we’re launching City Update: European Cities II. And let’s just go through it. So Barcelona, and it’s a much bigger, much bigger area of Barcelona. Now it’s brand new photogrammetry and the cleanup is much better. So I’ll just take a few screenshots. Next one is Madrid. So we’re staying in the South with a new football stadium. Couldn’t resist to put it there. Nice in France. Nice is right to the next city. This is actually connected. So we’re going to count it as one city. Monte Carlo is right there. Also brand new. And then Porto, which is great. Actually, we have a new DEM for this, which is going to help with the tree placement. And then lastly, Stockholm! So this is currently in 3D editing. All this is going to be ready for May 28th.
[Jayne] Looking forward to that. And with that, Local Legend 16.
Local Legend 16
[Jorg] Yep. Well, so then we had to find a European plane real quick. And there was a plane we wanted to do for a long time. We had some problems getting the license and then suddenly got the license and we talked to our lovely partners at iniBuilds. And here comes Michael again.
[Jayne] Yes. Welcome back, Michael. Hold on a second. All right. Introducing… There we go. The Flying Shoebox. Great nickname here.
[Michael] Yeah. So the Shorts SC7 Skyvan. Yes. The Shoebox. As it’s more affectionately known at the moment because of its unique shape. But ultimately a very versatile and rugged airframe, which gave it, despite its shape, some great short takeoff and landing performance and used pretty much worldwide for filling a variety of roles in military, passenger, [and] it was actually known as the luxury skyliner, for that one and also surveying. So they chucked a lot of survey equipment in the back, and put some interesting probes and stuff on this thing. I went off chasing kind of storms and going around weather events, but more commonly in its current livery it is a skydive platform which we’ve also modeled. So we’ve got these guys in the back sitting ready to go. And just to say, we’ve actually modeled four variants in total at the moment. The military version, the passenger, the surveyor, and the skydive. In terms of systems fidelity, we’ve got a lot of detail in here. Full electrical system models, the modern prop system, CFD, it’s all in there. Customized start sequence based on real world procedures, all that good stuff that you come to expect. A swap between classic and modern avionics suites on here, which I can show you is the classic on there, and a cool little representation of the Bendix weather radar in there as well. So, as I said, pretty good short takeoff performance. I’ll do a very quick demonstration. it’s also a bit of a party trick. I’ve actually flown in one of these uh not as the pilot, but in the back, jumping out at one point and the pilot got onto the runway, realized he didn’t have quite enough room despite its short takeoff performance, and decided to take it back a few inches just to get the full length for the runway. And yeah, just a quick takeoff just to show you it’s kind of short takeoff performance as well. [It] uses the Garrett 331 engines um same as what we had on the ME2, but quite powerful. Little turbine engines, turboprop engines on here. Gives you pretty quick acceleration to price despite its shape. And a big old payload of just over 9 000 pounds as well. So quickly accelerating up. Off it goes. Once it’s airborne, it’s quite docile, but could take you up to 10,000 feet with your jump altitude, chucking those guys out the back as you get up. So there we have it, the Shorts SE-7 Skyvan. Cool little aircraft to fly around. Lots of fun liveries to come as well, especially the skydiver variants, so look out for those. Yeah, very cool little plane.
[Jayne] Everyone is loving the livery!
[Michael] Yeah. The artists love doing these ones. Absolutely love it. Lots of fun.
[Jayne] Now, a question we get sometimes, Jorg, is how do you pick these local legends?
[Jorg] So I oftentimes talk to the people in the region. Like, for example, let’s just talk about… I don’t want to say what the plane is yet, but when we talk about World Update Brazil, I talk to a bunch of people in Brazil. “What is the most meaningful plane?” either in the history of Brazil or for Brazilian pilots. That way, you discover things that are not common, right? And this whole idea is that we get to know the world through flight sim, and in this case, the world of aviation. And here, the Skyvan, I mean, it was on our list for AirDvar. As I said, we couldn’t get the license. And then, in chatting with Michael, who’s from England, I don’t know if you hear the accent, we think this is a great fit.
[Jayne] Awesome. I love it. Thanks, Mike, for the demonstration.
[Michael] No problem.
[Jayne] I absolutely love it. Can’t wait to see that. All right.
Q&A Session 3
[Jayne] So we are back to our Q&A session three. I wanted to go back to the question I saw a little bit earlier when we were discussing DX12 and the issues there.
Where does the DX12 issues fall in the priority list?
[Jorg] The DX12 thing? Yes. Some people said, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not aware of this. So I want to be perfectly honest. We spent, again, our entire world test team, which is a reasonably large test team, looked at this bug, maybe not under the filter of it’s DX12 only. I think they looked at tiles that are popping bad. I don’t know about the render scale 200. Seb, I have no idea if you ever looked into this. I have not.
[Martial] No, but for the one on which you’ve got the aerials popping over the airport. So it is on the list of the bugs that we want you to tackle for this as well as well as the platform for PC for FS24. So obviously we’re spending a lot of time on that. And I’m sure that if any can be backported to 2020, it will be done. That’s for sure. That is the plan. It has always been the plan. Every fix that we are doing for Flight Sim 2020 that can be ported, it means it doesn’t rely on a new architecture, it will be done. It has already been the case, to be honest, even in SU15. This VFS optimization that we have was coming from like in 2024, initially. Seb, anything on that topic?
[Seb] No, no. And Jorg, you talked about the render scale issue. I’ve not heard about it.
[Jorg] I saw it in the chat. Many people are running into this particular issue, and it’s totally reproducible. I just personally have no insight.
[Seb] The only thing I could say is render scale 200, it’s a lot. Be careful. Like, if you’re 4K and rendezvous scale 200 that would be 8K just the VRAM should be very loaded uh at render scale 200 and but I don’t know yeah if there’s an issue let us know. We will investigate.
[Jorg] So, Jayne, it’s something we should look into. Like, I don’t know. I read that entire thread, and honestly under that thread, that’s not what i took out of it but let’s do it again. That’s why we’re having this conversation.
[Jayne] Yeah. All right. Thanks everyone. Let’s continue. We have our miscellaneous section here. All right.
Is it planned to be able to add default library objects to airports in the World Hub? And if not, why?
[Jorg] Well, so as we always said, the World Hub, we are trying to get into a rhythm, like how is the world at working, get feedback from y’all. And then as this stabilizes, we’ll think about expanding at this. A long time ago, I had this idea, I called it even something, I called it, let’s build the world together. There was all kinds of ideas what we could or should do with the World Hub, but we should take it one step at a time. Let’s make sure that what we have works and then we can expand it over years to come.
[Jayne] Awesome. All right.
Live traffic now features fitting liveries in each region based on other aircraft flying. Could this be expanded to static ground aircraft while live traffic is enabled? Currently, static aircraft placed by the simulator are random.
[Jorg] I was a little bit surprised by the Lufthansa. That really is true. I want to know about it because we don’t have a license for Lufthansa, which, by the way, pains me greatly because I’m from Germany. But anyways, so I don’t know if it’s automatic. So I saw the question just earlier today, so I need to look into this more. If it’s doable, we’ll do it. But right now, I don’t know.
[Jayne] Yeah. All right. Next question.
When you introduced the new ground physics friction and weight transfer, you stated that only a very small amount of aircraft in the core sim will be updated to take profit of it. Why not every aircraft?
[Seb] Yeah, so every time we do a new feature, we tend to push it at least on a small number of aircraft. Very often you will have noticed it’s the Cessna 172. We just don’t have the testing bandwidth. If for every feature we update every plane and then we need to test every plane every time, it’s just the amount of testing, which is, I mean, testing a plane fully, it just takes a lot of time. So what we generally do is we take a plane and then we introduce all the new features. You will have noticed, for example, that when Working Title goes over a new plane, they will add a CFD or they will take the ground. I think iniBuilds last time on the Q&A, last time they talked, they talked about also ground handling, but they integrated it generally. When we do a new plane or when we update a plane, we try to go over all the additional new features. So we would, for example, add the CFD if it doesn’t have it yet. But we don’t go for every feature to every plane. And then on every simulator, we need to test all the planes from scratch. That’s just too much work.
[Jayne]All right.
How long does it take to make the sound system of an airplane?
[Martial] It depends. It depends on which airplane. See, we’ve got an airplane which is pretty close to one that behaves at least pretty close to one that we’ve got. The setup can be quick. If it’s a completely new kind of aircraft or some motor we never had, the audio team here has to do a completely new engine on their own we are using voice. So they can do the mix. They can invent a pretty new system. And this is linked to the symbols that we’ve got. So it’s completely independent. And it’s helping us to do very complex things on every single aircraft. And on top of that, it can also take time to do the recording. I’ve went once with the audio team here to do the recording for planes, and it can be super long because they are recording every single button, every single motorized parts. When we can, it’s often the case we’re doing some runs with the planes, and they are doing dry runs. We’ve got mics everywhere to capture the sound of the engines. So this is taking time, too. And maybe the part which can be the more time-consuming is the time that we have to find a plane. Sometimes it can be very tricky to get an access to the plane in order to do the recording. So, if it’s a common plane close to a plane that we’ve already did, it can be pretty easy to create a new plane when it’s something completely new. With a pretty rare aircraft, then it can be complicated. So you’ve got the full spectrum of the level of difficulties we can get during the sound of an airplane.
[Jayne] That’s cool. Thanks, Martial. Going back up for chat, Seedy did post the two DX12 issues up there in our forum posts. They’re already posts created. So if you would like to contribute to that, with screenshots and to help us continue to look into this issue. That would be awesome. Thank you. All right. Next question. Marketplace related question here.
Can you share some details about the marketplace program requirements? Because some very well-known developers have been waiting to be accepted for more than three years, while some have their application approved much sooner. This behavior limits Xbox user choice, preventing them to enjoy some of the most known add-ons in the PC world.
[Jorg] Yeah, so I thought a question probably a few days ago from Jayne, and then I basically said, okay, let’s go ask them. So I asked Jayne to put a thread in the forums, which I’ve been watching as it grows. So, for what it’s worth, we have, I think, 1,700 applications. And the team, the good news is the team is now, we have capacity now to have new people come in. And but it’s 1700 applications and it would help us to know which ones you think are the most important ones, because we don’t know everybody. Like some of these, some of these things you have no idea. So that thread, if you could, if you have someone that you think somehow got missed, please write it down and we’ll make sure that that gets prioritized.
[Jayne] Yeah. And we’ll get that thread posted here in a moment. Speaking of marketplace, a few questions I saw earlier.
Is it possible to have two update days a week for the marketplace? Might help with backlogs. How does this work?
[Jorg] We’re actually looking into this exact thing. Good idea.
[Jayne] Yeah. Next question.
Does selecting individual or company affect approval speed for marketplace applications?
[Jorg] What?
[Jayne] In the application, you select individual or company?
[Jorg] Doesn’t matter.
[Jayne] Okay. Awesome. And an interesting suggestion here.
Can you separate Xbox and PC star ratings or let users do a short written review to help people picking Marketplace items?
[Jorg] Yeah. So we’ll talk about this more. 2024 is a significantly revamped Marketplace with a lot more things that you all have been asking for. So we are aware of this. It was probably a little bit too simple. But, yeah, there’s a lot coming. I saw some other questions related earlier. I was like, yep, we are working on all these things.
[Jayne] Awesome. Thank you.
What is the plan for DevSupport for the rest of 2024?
[Jorg] That question came from me. Totally leading. I was like, hey, we need to talk about this. Martial, you want to give the answer?
[Martial] Yes, well… Originally, this question came from the team, right? Because they’re working super hard. The SDK team and the DevSupport team is working pretty hard to let people know how to do things and to give some answers on the dedicated website. And they know that we have slowed down a little bit the pacing of the Sim Updates, which are the only updates and we’re breaking new codes and new features. And regarding what we are expecting to do with 2024, sometimes they feel a bit frustrated about not being able that we’ve got the same pacing for delivering some updates. And we have people to wait for new and longer updates. So, we are still planning to do an intense DevSupport. And the team will remain the same. But please be comprehensive with them. They will not be able to give you some promises they can’t keep. And so for most of them, if the fix is related to Sim Updates, they will not be able to give you some early dates, I would say. But the Dev Support is still there. Regarding the Dev Support, I would Just like to tell you something. It’s super important because the Dev Support team is sometimes losing a lot of time giving always and always the same kind of answers. And please, guys, if you can spend a little bit more time to read the former questions and the former answers, the team will appreciate that. They will gain time.
[Jayne] And similarly, while you’re not ready to talk about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024…
What are the plans for supporting FS20 after FS24 is released?
[Jorg] Yeah, so I think we talked about this before. So, 2020 obviously continues throughout this year. I don’t know if you just said it and I didn’t hear you, but Sim Update 15 is the last Sim Update on FS20 for this year. Simply because we need to focus the team. But we are planning on SIM updates for 2020 in the future. So there is a SU16 planned. It looks like it’s going to be early in 2025. And that will bring some of the features, as Martial mentioned a few earlier, like some of the things from 2024 will be backported if possible. So that’s that. And then the world, we will continue to do World Updates and City Updates and those types of things as well. And while not everything, because we’re bringing some new stuff with 2024, so not everything of that will be possible in 2020. We will continue to add new aerials, new height fields, new POIs, new airports, new TIN. All that will continue. But as far as sim updates, I mean, Seb you were the one who said we should do one or two a year. And I think that’s the current plan.
Do we get a new SDK Q&A live stream anytime soon? What do you think of that?
[Team] That’s a good question. It’s a good question. We discussed. We should ask Eric. This is interesting.
Could you look into doing some really behind-the-scenes stuff at Asobo? I’d love to see the offices and workers behind it all.
[Seb] Oh, I can turn my camera if you want to see the office.
[Martial] No, it’s pretty late as we speak. It’s 9 p.m. and it’s pretty black. I’m the only one, at least on that part of the office. I don’t know for you, Seb.
[Seb] Yeah, it’s past nine. I think I’m alone. I’m not sure, but it’s possible. Well, we are not sitting on the same floor. It’s just above me. But we’ll do some stuff like this. We’re planning on sort of a Feature Discovery Series again for 2024, and we should probably do some things with team or teams maybe.
[Jayne] Absolutely. That’d be cool. All right. So looking at the roadmap.
[Jorg] Let’s do it. Can we do like five minutes of open mic questions? I want to make sure that some people are. You know, we sometimes spend an hour and a half and people say, they didn’t answer my question. Let’s try.
[Jayne] It’s hard to see all of them when they’re going in so fast. Hold one moment.
Open Questions
Is FPS optimizations using dynamic/auto TLOD and OLOD going to be implemented?
[Seb] I think we talked about this on the last.
[Jayne]We did, yeah.
[Seb] So I think what I said and what is happening is that this is already the case on the console. And so we have the code. It’s just not enabled on PC. And we will look into, I mean, it’s just adding an option or something, right? We already have it. It’s just enabling it on PC. And it’s exactly what it does, right? It automatically balances the sliders, which are already in the options to maintain a target FPS. On consoles, it’s 35, I think. It really is 30, but we have to be a little bit above to be consistent on 30. And on PC, you could probably set it to 60-80, whatever. Have it being a number you could change.
[Jayne] All right.
Is there a situation we could share about SIM Connect for 2024? Will it still be there? Are you ever going to expand SIM Connect? Is this something you can answer at the moment?
[Seb] I mean, there’s stuff to say. I don’t know if it’s the right moment here to say it, but yeah.
[Martial/Seb] Well, it’s not a big secret. There’s no… We’re not removing anything. We are not removing anything, is what I was about to say. There’s nothing removed from the system.
[Jayne] Yeah.
Any news on the download speed problem in the content manager?
[Jorg] Hmm. Who wants this? [Martial: Jorg?] I mean, we know it’s not as fast as it could be, but we are changing a lot of things in 2024.
[Martial] Yes. Well, we have also some good news, right? Because I don’t know. Also, we already talked about that, that we are using some services and DNS. And so we also need the help of experts, of the ones that are doing the services. And the last time we spoke, they did some tweak and we should have been back to some better download.
[Jorg] We were actually hoping to hear more from y’all because it got faster, but we don’t want to say that, “Hey, it got faster.” And then the reality is actual consumers don’t really see it, but we think it’s faster.
[Martial] Yeah. So actually I’ve removed everything from my drive on my Xbox and PC just to test. It was faster, but, This is very localized. Every DNS is different regarding the area of the world you’re in. For me, it has worked pretty well. And there’s some additional work going on right now.
[Jorg] There’s some experiments going on right now to do. Maybe we get the next factor out of it. We’ll see.
[Jayne] It would be exciting, at least from chat here. Some people are saying download speed has been faster for them. So, good to know. Thanks, chat.
Is there plans for Microsoft Flight Simulator to have professional usage or licenses like X-Plane fully offline without Microsoft account support for external flight model systems, et cetera?
[Jorg] It’s undecided. We’re experimenting with something. That’s probably as far as we can go. We’re running a test, maybe. Actually, it’s not my decision even. I need to get some… people above me to say yes to that too. But so far the test is going well.
[Jayne] Yeah, that’s great. All right. I’ve seen this one a few times. This is a bug. This issue exists on Xbox.
There’s six specific world updates that won’t clear despite continually downloading them. They won’t go away no matter what is done because they’re shown as incomplete downloads. They can’t delete the world updates and re-download the update fresh. [Xbox]
[Jayne] Do you three know about this particular bug and its status? They are on [Xbox] Series S.
[Jorg] I saw it in the chat earlier. So I always get the chat log and I basically read it all and make action items after our sessions. This was one that I already mentally tagged. We need to look into this because I’ve never heard of it.
[Jayne] Sounds good. All right.
Is there any chance of better tools for interacting with WASM for developers? Right now, figuring out things like WASM crashes can be frustrating and sap a lot of time away from development.
[Martial] So I don’t know what to answer. They should use the DevSupport page. And I know that there are some exchanges about fixing and debugging WASM there. So I don’t know what I could say more on that topic.
[Jorg] I don’t know. I think we need to ask Eric if there’s anything. Yes. Eric has been working on this with his team to go through WASM again. Yeah, they did a lot of work on the allocation as we spoke earlier in this chat. Yeah. And I can tell you that the team is tracking everything that has been written in DevSupport. So they want to help anybody that wants to create any assets.
[Jayne] Certainly. Yeah. Okay.
[Martial] Well, they’re super dedicated. I can tell you. It’s important.
Is SU15 delayed again?
[Jorg] We probably need another week. So we said, that’s why I wrote tentative in the depth roadmap thingy. It looks like we need another week because basically they looked into WASM issues and found some other things. And then the GDK work didn’t go as smoothly as we initially hoped. There was some, there was some textual corruption stuff and, which now was found, but just to make sure that everything is properly tested and stable, and obviously we need to flight it again, it’s most likely going to be the week of May 7th.
[Jayne] Yeah. Okay. Good suggestion for future sessions, have a follow-up section, and then new questions like that. Thank you.
[Jorg] Yeah, I mean, we closed everything down. The only thing, so there’s going to be a new cooker, and that any builds, because we’re going to recook the WASM planes that are the A310 and the A320neo that then takes advantage of the, all the code fixes. That’s one of the, so the code fixes has to be done. We get a new cooker. We recook the packages. We throw it out into another, into another flight. We sit on that for a week and then we publish.
[Jayne] All right. Here’s the question.
Will we ever get a fix on Xbox with the payware airports in the anniversary update? There’s no way to uninstall an airport in there. So our payware airports are just sitting. Everything is overlapped. Two airports in one.
[Jorg] Yeah, this came up before.
[Jayne] I do remember.
[Jorg] Yeah. We need to look into this. Can you can you hide a default payware? That’s a good question. You look at it again.
[Jayne] Yep.
[Jorg] Okay. Okay. Okay. That makes sense.
[Martial] Yeah. Well, I think that it’s also, when you’re doing another report, in order to make sure that it’s covering a default location, you’ve got to do an exclusion zone. And doing that, the report should remove every asset which is beneath. Yeah, so I’ve got to check that too. But as a matter of fact, you can’t, especially on Xbox, you can’t uninstall. That’s right. You can’t uninstall it, but you should be able to hide it. To hide it, yes. If it’s done properly on the third-party side, it should work.
[Jorg] By the way, I read earlier somewhere that we don’t fix bugs in default airports. That’s, I mean, for what it’s worth. I think we fixed a few hundred, and then just this latest update, I think we fixed everything that we know about. So if you have some more bugs, for example, Dallas, we knew there were some bugs specifically in the runway. So we know about that. But we go through triage all the time, twice a week on world stuff. And we try to fix everything. So if you have more bugs, please just put them in the forum somewhere, DevSupport or whatnot, Zendesk, all kinds of ways to communicate.
How many people work at Asobo?
[Martial] Am I allowed to give the right number?
[Jorg] On the product or on the?
[Martial] On the product, yes. Jorg.
[Jorg] 200, roughly. Roughly 200. Yeah, that’s right. In total, the number goes up and down because we have a bunch of other companies obviously working on this. I think we have about 700 people right now working on the flight sim, I think, in different capacities. But that includes people like the iniBuilds team, the people that work on the planes with us. And the Gaya team and the Orbx team and Working Title team, there’s lots and lots and lots and lots of teams. I think in total there’s 25 or 26. But Asobo is probably the biggest. You need to think about it this way. Asobo the center, and then there’s other people that have expertise in areas that take care of those areas.
[Jayne] Nice.
Are you still considering a freeware section on the marketplace?
[Jorg] Definitely! And this list that you guys, I mean, so I love that, that people immediately responded. And there were obviously freeware developers. Because ultimately, you know, it’s important that we, it’s essentially, it’s probably a bad word, fan service, right? Like there’s, you guys know, you have a lot more time to look at every single thing. We just can’t do it, right? And if there’s a standout release from a freeware person, I don’t care if it costs any money or whatnot, right? So if it’s great, it’s great. and then it should be available. What I’ve seen so far on the list is not all of them were freeware, but a lot of them were freeware, and that helps quite a bit.
[Jayne] Awesome. Jorg, would you like to talk about the next slide here?
[Jorg] I just want to say something about Hawaii. Hawaii is a story of a flaky pilot. So, we hired someone in a plane in Hawaii. That’s right. And they just flat out never finished the job. So we are now looking for a different pilot with a different plane to actually finish the job. But that’s just life, right? We do these things in real time, you know. But I went to Hawaii. I go there on vacation every so often and I love it. And it should be awesome in flights. I mean, currently it’s sort of like meh. So we are going to get Hawaii and we’re going to, We’re going to hire someone who’s actually finishing the job.
[Jayne] Pilots, don’t be flaky. All right. A clarification question.
Is Dallas Airport fixed or scheduled to be fixed?
[Jorg] It is. It’s in SU15.
[Jayne] Yep. Okay. Thank you. All right.
Top Gun: Maverick Expansion Removal
[Jorg] Are we on the slide? Are we done? Okay. Jayne is questioned out. Here we go. Well, anyway, so you saw this, then this is sort of bittersweet for me because I love it. So come to the next slide. This was a very successful expansion. We’re approaching 3 million downloads. We’ve seen over 40 million flight sessions and because it’s a movie license, those things, unfortunately not endless. It’s going to leave the marketplace on [May 25th] so I don’t think many people have not downloaded this that are on this call, but, but, but if you want it, that would be a good time. because in about a month, it’s gone. Yeah.
[Jayne] So if they download it now, they’ll have it when it’s gone.
[Jorg] And I would, if there’s a Top Gun, I will show us, I’ll try to do something else again with those guys, but you know, they talk about it. So, so, so, but you know, we’ll see.
[Martial] So maybe we’ve got to be a little bit more clear. If you have downloaded it, you will keep it.
[Jorg] It’s not going to be deleted from your machine. That’s not even legal, right? But you can’t download it again, basically, is the problem. If you’re a new customer, you can’t download it again.
[Jayne] Okay. All right. Salute. It was great having it. And next, an announcement.
MSFS2024 Update
[Jorg] I mean, so I can’t say that much yet. We’re getting very close, but we’ll talk a lot more. But 2024, last time we talked about some planes from FlightFX, and today I want to show who makes the planes that are in these trailers. So here we go. Here are the lovely Beluga and the A400M, and they are both made by… iniBuilds! So makes me happy high quality aircraft it’s important so you will see over the over the coming months so I it’s like you know the roadmap right I actually wanted to make a little grid of all the planes that are coming and open little doors and stuff and at some point I’ll spend a day and putting something like this together but it’s super exciting the fleet for the fleet for 2024 is awesome and we’ll share them sort of over time more and more.
[Jayne] Yeah. All right. Fantastic.
FSExpo 2024
[Jorg] Just want to say it again. I didn’t even change those slides from last time. We will be, so Seb and I are going to be there. We’re having a booth again, and we’re really looking forward to meeting some of you for the first time, some of you again. It’ll be fun. I’m really excited for it. I had a great, great time. I think Seb, you did too last year, right? That was super. Yeah.
[Jayne] Look forward to meeting you and everybody in the community there. If you are going. Can’t wait to see you.
Conclusion
[Jayne] And that is the end of our stream. I know we didn’t answer every single question. Hopefully we answered a good amount. But yeah, we will continue to. We’ll follow up on some of the ones we didn’t quite have answers for yet. And discuss them again with you when possible. It’s appropriate for us to share more details. But Jorg, Seb, Martial, thank you for joining. Thank you for having us. Yeah, Charles and Mike as well. Thank you for joining. Glad you can be on our stream today. We will see you in a month or so for our next stream. But until then, please enjoy the simulator. Enjoy your May. I guess that’s the month that’s coming up. And we’ll talk to you soon.
[Team] Bye everyone!